How Frankenstein's Monster Works

"Hear my tale; it is long and strange ... "Withered lips utter these words. The speaker's face seems nothing
more than a rotting mask of skin, barely stretched into place over sinew
and vein. Wild, black hair cascades down the figure's massive
shoulders, and gleaming eyes stare out through the tangled strands.
Tattered garments adorn his towering frame.Despite his size, the monster moves with agility and grace. Despite
his brutish appearance, his speech betrays a formidable intellect. He is
nameless. He is angry. His words steam in the cold air as he confronts
the tormented chemist responsible for his very existence, a man named
Victor Frankenstein.Related in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's original 1818 novel, this
encounter occurs halfway through a book already marked by the power of
science and human misery. For Victor Frankenstein, this exchange is a
confrontation with his brother's murderer, as well as the shameful fruit
of his own scientific recklessness. For the creature, it is an audience
with the man who formed his disfigured body out of cadavers and animal
parts -- who gave him life only to abandon his creation to an
unforgiving world.This reunion of creator and creation results in a fleeting truce.
Victor agrees to assemble a female companion for the creature, who in
turn promises to spare the lives of Victor's remaining loved ones and
depart for the wilds of South America. When Victor reneges on his
promise, however, their peace collapses into a bloody feud.This conflict is the backbone of the famous fictional work
"Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus," a tale of vast scientific
achievement and deep existential failure. The relationship between
Victor and his creation is a complex one, far more nuanced than the
man-versus-monster and brains-versus-brute scenarios splashed all over
popular culture. Just who is this nameless, synthetic being? What
cultural ideas does he embody, and why does his presence continue to
haunt us?In this article, we'll uncover the heart of Frankenstein's monster.

The Artificial Man in Myth and Mind

In Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," the titular character develops the means to instill the spark of life into an artificial being.
While the 1818 novel certainly broke new literary ground, the notion of
synthetic life hails back to the earliest stirrings of human culture.Myth and folklore are rich with tales of humans or gods breathing
life into humanoid statues. For the ancient Greeks, there was Pygmalion,
whose ivory, female sculpture awoke with the help of the god Venus.
Medieval Jewish folktales speak of golems, artificial beings brought into being via a tablet of sacred words inserted beneath the clay humanoid's tongue.Regardless of whether divine intervention or human ingenuity
accomplishes this feat, these examples depend on a certain degree of
magical thinking. Long before we fantasized about bringing life to the
lifeless, we learned to carry out this trick inside the mind.Humans have a knack for attributing life to artificial likenesses. It's called anthropomorphism, and it refers to when we take nonhuman or impersonal objects and give them human or personal characteristics or behaviors.A brick is just a brick, right? What happens when you paint a smiley
face on it? It inevitably becomes a little harder (or easier) to throw
that brick down a well because you've imbued it with a sense of being.
This interesting quirk stems from something anthropologists call the law of similarity,
which holds that humans inevitably link superficial, real-life
resemblances to deep, unreal resemblances. A baby doll isn't an actual
infant, but it resembles one enough to make it "real" to the child who
plays with it. Here's a way to test the law of similarity on your own:
Sketch the face of a loved one on a scrap of paper and then crumple it
in your hand. Did you feel the connection your mind forms between the
resemblance and the thing itself?Out of this phenomenon, innumerable magical and religious practices
emerge, such as harming a person's likeness to produce the same effect
on the actual person. Such so-called sympathetic magic includes the burning of effigies and the use of voodoo dolls.The roots of anthropomorphic thinking lie in the human capacity for reflexive consciousness, the ability to use what we know about ourselves to understand and predict the behavior of others [source: Serpell].
These empathetic qualities gave early humans an evolutionary advantage,
allowing them to not only outthink other people, but also to fit the
behavior of domesticated animals within the confines of human society.As a curious side effect, these quirks of human cognition also enable us to dream about bringing man-made likenesses to life.So where does all this magic meet Frankenstein's world of science? On the next page, we'll venture into the realm of alchemy.

Frankenstein's Alchemical Blueprint

An alchemist chases the secrets of nature in this 1618 engraving.

Hulton Archive/[urlGetty Images

In "Frankenstein," Victor ventures into his study of chemistry with a
zeal for the antiquated world of alchemy. While his professor dismisses
this enthusiasm as a grievous waste of time, alchemy ultimately
inspires Victor to crack the secrets of life itself.Alchemy during the 16th through 18th centuries was essentially a mix
of early chemistry and occultism, crossing empirical research with
mystical philosophy. Alchemists slaved over real (and sometimes
explosive) chemical experiments, but they did so without the regulation
of modern scientific method. Instead seeking guidance in magical texts
and secret codes, they sought to transform base metals into gold and
even achieve immortality via an elixir of life known as the philosopher's stone.It was a meandering path to say the least -- and one that ultimately impeded the rise of modern chemistry [source: Wilford].
Yet some alchemists managed to stumble upon some genuine scientific
discoveries. For instance, 17th century German alchemist Hennig Brandt
distilled countless buckets of urine in an attempt to turn the pungent
liquid into gold.
As you might expect, Brandt 's experiment failed to produce the desired
results -- but it did allow him to discover the element phosphorus.
Alchemy might have been an imperfect field of study, but it was often
the only game in town for inquisitive, talented minds such as Albertus
Magnus and Isaac Newton.The fictional Frankenstein's work closely resembles alchemical attempts to produce a minuscule artificial humanoid known as a homunculus. A medieval text known as the "Liber Vaccae"
or "Book of the Cow" lays out the homunculus creation formula in
bizarre detail. The process begins by mixing human semen with a mystical
phosphorescent elixir and ends with a newborn homunculus emerging from a
cow, growing human skin and craving its mother's blood inside a large
glass or lead vessel [source: Van der Lugt].Yes, it's all quite disgusting, but here's the point: While lost
amid false concepts of spontaneous generation and magical tomfoolery,
alchemists were pondering the possibility of creating an artificial
"rational animal" through the learned manipulation of organic tissue.At the time, it was widely believed that humans could mimic and
manipulate such natural reproductive processes. But biological science
was still incubating, and humanity's first breakthroughs came in the
form of machines.

A Clockwork Frankenstein

While Frankenstein's monster certainly emerges from a legacy of
alchemical homunculi and other magically created creatures, he has
another distant ancestor in the automaton. An obsession of the
ancient Greeks and Chinese, automatons were machines designed to mimic a
living body. They were not intelligent in any sense of the word, but
still served as a forerunner to modern computational robots.Accounts of automatons date back as far as the fourth century B.C.,
when Greek poet Pindar wrote of animated statues on the streets of
Rhodes and Archytas of Tarentum reportedly built a self-propelled
mechanical bird [source: Babich]. Over time, countless engineers and inventors applied their intellect to mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic
and electric mimicry of biological life. Their attempts ranged from
Leonardo da Vinci's 15th century robotic knight, designed to walk and
sit, to Jacques de Vaucanson's 18th century digesting duck, which
reportedly boasted both motorized chewing skills and a mechanical
sphincter to mimic defecation.Both da Vinci's knight and Vaucanson's duck demonstrate their
makers' profound interest in biomechanics. Da Vinci was fascinated by
human musculature and devoted long hours to the study of cadavers. For
Vaucanson's part, his fascination with digestion and defecation may have
stemmed from his own troubled bowels [source: Wood].All this mimicry stems from the quest to understand biological life.
The quest is not unlike that of homunculi-brewing alchemists -- and
indeed, great minds such as the 13th century's Albertus Magnus
experimented with both mechanical automation and alchemy. The
difference, however, is that mechanical efforts produced tangible
results, provoking public fascination and even outrage.After all, if a machine can mimic the human body, then is the human
body nothing more than a biochemical machine? And if we're machines,
then what does it mean to be human? What, if anything, sets us apart
from animals or dancing automatons?

Ghost in the Machine

Beyond the scars and stitches, Frankenstein's creation is a philosophically frightening monster.

Seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes viewed nature
as primarily mechanical. He avoided the messier, existential
complications of this view by defining the human soul as an independent
force -- the "ghost in the machine," as philosopher and Descartes critic
Gilbert Ryle would later describe it.But is there a ghost at all? According to psychologist Paul Bloom,
the human notion of a soul or an external mind stems from the fact that
the human brain has no awareness of its own functioning. In other words,
the conscious mind exists in its own blind spot, generating the illusion of its separateness.It's a potentially volatile idea for a culture consumed by ego and
religious cosmology. In 1748, Julien Offray de La Mettrie found this out
firsthand when he published "L'Homme plus que Machine" or "Man
More Than Machine," in which the French philosopher argued that the soul
was but the product of the biochemical machine we call a body. The
resulting public outrage forced de La Mettrie to flee his native
Netherlands.Victor Frankenstein withholds the details of exactly how he breathes
life into his monster, but the being that rises from the operating
table is fully human in mind if not in body. At first benevolent, the
creature is driven to murder and rage by the cruel realities of the
world.As the novel's alternate title states, Victor Frankenstein is "the
modern Prometheus." The Greek mythological figure stole the secret of fire
from the gods and gave it to man. Frankenstein takes the human
condition out of the hands of divinity and places it within the grasp of
science.Nearly two centuries later, this transition still resonates
throughout human culture -- and Frankenstein's monster looms tall as its
avatar.

The Modern Monster

In recounting his tale of scientific glory and personal hell, Victor
Frankenstein skims over the pertinent scientific details. He discusses
his alchemical inspirations and zeal for modern chemistry. He mentions
cadavers and the effect of electricity
on muscle tissue. He stares deep into the space between life and death.
Beyond this, we can only guess how Frankenstein learned to "bestow
animation upon lifeless matter."Scientists of the 20th and 21st centuries, however, are a lot more
forthcoming. Advances in synthetic biology and other fields continue to
push the boundaries of human understanding and raise new existential
dilemmas.In 1952, researchers unlocked the mystery of DNA,
and subsequent breakthroughs in genetics have empowered the science of
cloning. In 2010, researchers created a synthetic bacterium in the lab
-- the first one to be controlled entirely by man-made genetic
instructions. Elsewhere, roboticists continue to develop increasingly
complex, autonomous artificial intelligence and biologically inspired
mechanical forms.Through it all, Frankenstein's monster continues to resonate as a
powerful model of unchecked scientific advancement -- as well as a
reminder of the murky philosophical and ethical quagmires we wish to
avoid.Thanks in large part to film depictions, the monster's pop culture
image is often reduced to a staggering, bewildered brute. But even if
you take into account the original creature's intelligence and
complexity, he is most certainly a monster in the true sense of the
word. The word "monstrosity" originates from the Latin monstrare, which meant to show or illustrate a point. Our monsters embody ideas, fears and abstractions about the human condition.Victor Frankenstein ultimately loses everything to the monster. He
agrees to create a female companion for it, but destroys it in a rage
and breaks their fragile truce. Provoked, the monster murders Victor's
bride. In the end, the bloody feud condems both tormented souls to a
death amid the Arctic wastes.As a modern myth, "Frankenstein" taps into the fear that like
Victor, we'll lack the wisdom or responsibility to control our
scientific creations. The monster embodies such modern fears as a
lab-created black hole, man-made plagues and nuclear annihilation. The
story also poses the possibility that, like the monster himself, science
will deliver us to a place where we find the integrity of the human
body violated and the nature of the human soul scourged.

Adamson, Melitta Weiss. "Food in the Middle Ages: a book of essays." Routledge. May 1, 1995.